Simon Armitage, specifically his first collection KID is fantastic. Wendy Cope's MAKING COCOA FOR KINGSLEY AMIS is also fantastic. Another modern poet to watch is Ken Babstock. (He's Canadian and a friend of mine, actually.) Ooh, and James Tate!

I didn't really get Keats' Ode On A Grecian Urn until I was forty; how a guy in his 20s could have written that is beyond me.

Kipling in the middle of his career was just fucking awesome.

When Earth's last picture is painted and the tubes are twisted and dried,When the oldest colours have faded, and the youngest critic has died,We shall rest, and, faith, we shall need it -- lie down for an aeon or two,Till the Master of All Good Workmen shall put us to work anew.

And those that were good shall be happy; they shall sit in a golden chair;They shall splash at a ten-league canvas with brushes of comets' hair.They shall find real saints to draw from -- Magdalene, Peter, and Paul;They shall work for an age at a sitting and never be tired at all!

And only The Master shall praise us, and only The Master shall blame;Andd no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!

If you want love poetry (and this being White Chapel... clearly) Rumi is the one and only place to go. If you want something a bit more cheerful (you know, like family being too drunk to leave a burning trailer) Sherman Alexi is rock solid. I'm also fairly partial to William Blake.

Autoethnographic, by Michael Brennan. It's a wild ride, like being dragged face down through a fairground by a bonobo while Tom Waits follows after you yelling less-than-helpful suggestions through a megaphone. It's hilarious. It's disturbing. It's heartbreaking. It's got a nice cover. Which, incidentally, is my artwork.

I've been collaborating with Mr Brennan for decades. He's the strongest voice of my generation in Australian poetry, and this is the best work he's done to date. He also runs Vagabond Press, for whom I've been doing handmade limited edition cover art since 1999. The Press site's nearly finished, and we've got five new books out.